Blind Twins Share a Special Vision of Radio’s Past : Broadcasting: John and Larry Gassman, 39, have turned their passion for the old-time drama of the airwaves into a weekly show on KPCC.

John and Larry Gassman have never seen a picture of Superman. They can’t. Born more than two months premature, their optic nerves never matured enough to allow them to ever see anything.

So they listen instead. Since childhood, the 39-year-old identical twins have been hooked on radio dramas, listening to shows that allow them to use their imaginations to follow the red-caped Man of Steel as he leaped tall buildings in a single bound.

“One of our earliest memories is hearing a radio drama when we were 5 or 6,” said John, who along with his brother has developed a zealous determination to never let the recordings of old-time radio dramas such as “Superman,” “Gunsmoke” and “The Green Hornet” vanish from the airwaves.

Their collection of nearly 20,000 reel-to-reel tapes of vintage shows lines the walls and spreads onto the floor of the family room-turned-studio, from which the Gassmans produce a weekly show of classic radio drama for KPCC-FM (89.3) in Pasadena.

John walks slowly among the stacks of tapes on the floor, some recently deposited on the carpet of their Whittier home by the Northridge earthquake. He puts on headphones as he nears a table covered in reel-to-reel tape machines.

“Oh great, now I can’t hear where I’m going,” he mumbles, reaching his hands out.

“Well, it’s never stopped you before,” said Larry, who is already seated in front of his microphone. Their fingers dance deftly across the dials of their tape recorders and then the two launch into the introduction to their show, “Same Time, Same Channel” (heard Sundays from 5 to 7 p.m.).

“Got a lot of variety on the show this week,” John says. He adds that the herniated disc that was pinching the nerves in Larry’s neck has been removed.

“But we’ve found you can’t play the disc (on a turntable) with acupuncture needles after all,” John says. “So stop calling.”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve mentioning that,” Larry quips.

The show is timed using a talking clock that quietly rattles off 10-second increments in a canned digital voice out of range of the microphones, and their talking watches have a crowing-rooster alarm to stop them from running over.

The brothers still make their tapes on reel-to-reel recorders.

“It’s harder to use the new tape recorders,” Larry says. “We’ve always had to do everything by feel and sound, and the new buttons don’t make any noise.”

Most of their collection is taped from records donated by radio drama stars, such as the late Vincent Price, John says. The 16-inch discs captured about 15 minutes of performance on each side of an aluminum-based record. During World War II, such records were made on glass to save the metal for the war effort.

“We put ads in the papers when we started collecting, and word spread from word-of-mouth that we wanted the recordings,” John says. “People are usually glad to give (the records) to us because we have the turntables to play them and the equipment to preserve the discs,” which are very fragile.

KPCC is a public radio station broadcasting from Pasadena City College, so the brothers do their show for free. They get by on Social Security and a little money they make from singing with a local barbershop quartet.

The Gassmans started playing records at Rio Hondo College in the early 1970s. After earning degrees in communications from Cal Poly Pomona, they got their chance to fill the radio drama slot at KPCC in 1980 after an announcer moved to Arizona. They’ve been spinning stacks of old records ever since.

“They’re remarkable guys, and their knowledge and love of radio as an art form is just very special” said KPCC Program and News Director Larry Mantle, who has worked with the Gassmans for a decade.

“(The Gassmans) appreciate a lot of things that made radio exciting before market-driven companies got into it,” Mantle said. “So much of what we hear today on radio is commercialized and dull.”

Not that radio drama is making it big-time. Arbitron ratings show that they attract about 15,000 listeners during their two-hour broadcasts. By comparison, KLSX’s Howard Stern pulls in about 1.2 million listeners each morning.

The Gassmans continued to break new ground when they covered the Rose Parade for KPCC from 1987 to 1989. Their broadcasts, which won an advertising industry award, were the result of tours of the floats in which they were allowed to clamber all over the petal-covered creations and literally feel their sizes, shapes and textures.

“We were really popular because we described all the floats in detail, and nobody does that any more on TV. But we never got to drive one. I always wish we’d gotten to drive a float--we asked but we couldn’t because of insurance,” John said.